Lost Crow Conspiracy (Blood Rose Rebellion, Book 2)

by Rosalyn Eves

  I watched Gábor’s face. For a long moment he looked at me solemnly, his dark eyes fixed on mine. Then he raised my gloved hand to his lips and kissed it. A pleasant buzz raced up my arm. “I am very glad to hear it.” He lowered my hand, but did not release it.

  “Will you escort us home?” I asked, heat rising in my face.

  “Gladly,” he said, proffering both arms. I slid my free arm through his and resisted the overwhelming urge to lay my head against his shoulder. Noémi, with only a small hesitation, released me and accepted his other arm.

  As we walked, we chatted about unimportant things: Gábor’s journey from Buda-Pest, the movements of the still-new Hungarian government, the unseasonably warm spring. Noémi described an opera she had recently attended.

  When we reached the gate of the Eszterházy Palace, where Noémi stayed with her wealthy cousins, Noémi released Gábor’s arm with a murmured thank-you. She stood waiting, her head slightly cocked, for me to follow her. “Aren’t you coming in, Anna? I can have one of the carriages take you home.”

  “No need.” I curled my fingers tighter into Gabor’s coat sleeve. “Gábor can see me home. It’s not far.”

  “But the impropriety…”

  “Accepting a gentleman’s escort on a public street? No one will pay us any heed.”

  She still looked doubtful, biting at the corner of her lip. Then her face softened. “All right. You know I only want you to be happy. Just—be careful.” She disappeared inside the building.

  I released a long sigh and let myself lean my head against Gábor’s arm, as I had wanted to do since I saw him. His coat smelled of smoke from the lecture hall, but beneath it I caught the familiar notes of sunshine and growing things. I allowed myself only a moment, as the street was still too public for an actual embrace, then straightened, and we proceeded toward the flat near the embassy where I lived with Richard and Catherine.

  “How is your family?” The last time I had seen Gábor’s family, my uncle Pál had just cast a spell severing their connection to magic and their ability to speak. That moment haunted me, not only for the casual cruelty of the spell, but because it had been partly my fault. My brother and I had inadvertently revealed that the Romanies were using magic outside the Circle’s law. My family’s position had protected me, but Gábor’s family had had no such protection.

  “They are well,” Gábor said. “After the Binding broke, the ban on magic dissolved. Izidóra and my grandmother were able to lift your uncle’s spell with the help of a Romani woman living near Lake Balaton.”

  A wave of relief rushed over me. “I am so glad.”

  “As am I. I miss them, though. I have never been from home so long. I hope to see them again when the Congress ends.”

  “Please give my regards to Izidóra,” I said. A warm breeze swirled around us, tugging at the loose curls over my ears. “I miss my brother too. And Papa.” It was hard to miss Mama too much with Catherine at hand to remind me of her.

  Gábor told me of his work, carrying messages and searching out information for the Congress, copying documents for Kossuth. It was not his heart’s work—not the scientific experiments he planned someday to conduct—but it was important work, and he hoped to influence Kossuth to pass Romani-friendly laws when the Hungarian parliament convened. At length, he pulled away to study me, his eyes warm. “And you, Anna? Are you well?”

  Because his question was genuine, I gave him a true answer, rather than the brittle society answer I gave everyone else. “I miss Grandmama. I miss Mátyás. Everything feels so uncertain. The praetheria are under attack, Hungary is not safe, and if their safety fails, then I have failed and Mátyás will have died for nothing.” I did not realize, until I spoke the words, how much I had bottled up with them. Tears spilled down my cheeks, salt against my lips. Instead of drawing back in discomfort or disgust, Gábor shepherded me to the side of the street, handed me a clean handkerchief, and stood between me and the road, shielding me from the gazes of passersby.

  When I had wrung myself dry, he took the handkerchief from me and dabbed gently at the tears still streaking my face. And though I knew I must look a fright, my eyes swollen and my cheeks blotchy, the only thing I saw in his face was concern.

  “I miss Mátyás too,” Gábor said, then added, “He still owes me money.”

  My hiccup turned into a giggle, then a decidedly unladylike snort, and we both laughed. Gábor extended his arm again, and we continued on our way.

  When we reached Richard and Catherine’s flat, I asked, “When will I see you again?”

  He pressed a kiss, featherlight, against my temple. “I don’t know yet. As soon as I can.”

  I released a slow breath. Whatever was growing again between us was still new and fragile. It might be crushed in all the upheaval around us. But in that moment it felt like an island when everything else was at sea.

  *

  The archduchess’s school for magic occupied a plain grey stone building near the walls of the city. A porter greeted Ginny and me in the clean, if spartan, lobby before disappearing to find one of the instructors. After we waited perhaps a quarter of an hour, a dark-haired young woman appeared.

  “You’re here to enroll?” she asked in German.

  Ginny glanced sidelong at me. I translated for her, then said, “This is Ginny Davies. She has come to be tested for magic. If she does indeed have magic, then yes, she’d like to enroll.” We had already arranged that I would pay any fees.

  The young woman studied me a long moment before flicking her attention to Ginny. She smiled. “Very well. Follow me, if you please.”

  We climbed a narrow staircase and then passed down a long hallway, flanked on one side by windows opening onto a courtyard, and classrooms on the other. I dawdled behind the others, trying to steal a better look at the students. In one room, a group of mostly children, with a handful of older men and women, practiced kindling basic Lumen lights. In another room, a grizzled man stood in the center of the classroom, surrounded by men and women of all ages, a breeze stirring the hair at his temples and whipping through the room, though the air in the hallway was still. Elementalists. From the clothing styles and smattering of languages I heard, the school must hold a dozen nationalities, from social classes ranging from the poor to wealthy middle class. Nobility, of course, would have their own private tutors at home.

  Inside the classroom, the students began to chant, echoing the instructor. The magic in the room, amplified by all the voices, buzzed along the base of my skull. A memory of heat hummed through me, the agonizing power of the Binding spell burning inside just before it broke. I retreated from the open doorway, my heart thundering in my chest, my palms damp. Relax, I thought. Relax. I did not break spells when I was calm.

  “Miss?” the young woman called, waiting for me beside a door at the end of the hallway. Ginny rubbed her fingers, a habit she only adopted when she was anxious.

  I scrambled after them. “It’s a wonderful school.” Though wonderful was only a step removed from terrible: all that power, all that potential for creation and for destruction. I hoped Ginny would find her gift less ambiguous than mine.

  The woman’s cheeks brightened. “Yes. Thank you, miss.”

  We were led into a large room, a table and three chairs the only furnishings. The chairs were already occupied by two middle-aged men and a woman, so we stood in the center of the room.

  The young woman who’d led us to the room turned to Ginny. “Please tell us why you think you might have magic, Miss Davies.”

  Ginny looked at me again. I translated, but before I could answer, one of the men held up his hand. In English he said, “Please, let the applicant speak. Has something happened? It’s all right. There is no wrong answer.”

  Ginny took a deep breath. “I was pressing Miss Anna’s dress and saw there was a smudge on it. I tried to rub it out, something I’ve done hundreds of times, but the stain would not come. I knew Miss Anna was waiting on the dress
. A hot feeling started in my head and spread down my arms and hands, like I was standing too close to the fire. But I wasn’t. And then these spots started to show—tiny burnt spots everywhere I touched the dress.”

  “Hmm.” The man adjusted the neckcloth at his throat. “Has this happened before?”

  “Only once. But it was an old dress and Miss Anna wasn’t waiting on it, so I got rid of it.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked softly.

  She shrugged, not looking at me.

  “Have you been feeling differently?” the man asked. “Many of our students report that they began sensing something different soon after the Binding broke.”

  After a moment, Ginny nodded. “A kind of lightness in my head, or a humming, like a wind was blowing there all the time. I thought maybe I was sickening for something.”

  Ginny had felt this for months? “You might have said something. I would have helped you.”

  She shook her head. “It was nothing. And you were that upset about your grandmama and your cousin; then we came here.”

  “Well. It certainly sounds possible,” the man said. “We’d like you to try a spell for us. Miss Meier will demonstrate.” He nodded at the young woman.

  “Wait!” My anxiety from the hallway rushed back. I had not broken a spell in months, not since the Binding, but that did not mean I might not do so here. That would not be fair to Ginny—and it could be disastrous for me, if the instructors of the school reported back to the archduchess that I could break spells. “I’m afraid I am sometimes…unwell around magic. Disgraceful in one Luminate-born, I know, but so it is. I’ll wait outside.”

  I made my way back down the hall, darting past the classrooms. Once outside, I let the heavy wooden door thump into the frame behind me. I rested my head against the frame, breathing deeply. I hoped Ginny would do well. I hoped she might have the chance to study magic as I had not, as my younger brother James could not. After the Binding had broken, James, like so many other Luminate, had lost what little magic the Binding had granted him. But James did not seem to mind so much—his passion had always been for classics, not magic, and he was no longer the only nonmagical student in his class.

  I traced runes over the stone wall beside me with my gloved finger: a leaf, a flower, a bird soaring into the sky.

  Ginny emerged several minutes later, her cheeks flushed and eyes bright. “You were right. I have magic! Elementalist, they said. They want me to study here.”

  Elementalist—like my father. Like Catherine.

  Before the Binding had broken, the four orders of Luminate—Elementalist, Lucifera, Coremancer, and Animanti—had been strictly regulated, so no one could possess gifts of more than one order. (My uncle Pál had been an exception, granted access by the Austrian Circle to multiple orders on the strength of his gift. A mistake, as it turned out, since Pál had betrayed and killed the man the Circle had sent to stop me from breaking the Binding.) In the wake of the Binding, I understood that the orders were more relaxed, as someone with mostly Elementalist gifts—weather magic, fire manipulation, and the like—might occasionally manifest with prophetic dreams (Coremancer) or mild healing (Animanti). A Lucifera with the ability to fold the earth, as I had seen Lady Berri do, might also call wind. But the categories still proved useful, as most gifts tended to cluster around a particular ability.

  “Should you like it?” A heavy, hard lump settled in my stomach. I should be happy for Ginny, for all the opportunities magic would open to her. And I was—only, I had seen what magic could cost, what my gift cost. But I could not project my ambivalence on her.

  “I think so.” Her face fell. “But will you mind? With you and James not doing magic, will your family think I am rising too much above my station?”

  “Oh, pooh,” I said, throwing my arms around her. “Who cares what my mother might think. This is why I—” I stopped, remembering where we were. “This is what we fought for last fall, so that anyone with aptitude might learn magic. It’s a new world now.” Or ought to be.

  “And Catherine?”

  I pressed my lips together. Catherine had abandoned her dreams to study magic after I had spoiled her debut, after she had met Richard. But Catherine would undoubtedly care.

  “She doesn’t need to know.”

  “It’s so lovely of you to join us, Noémi,” my sister said, pouring steaming tea into the delicate Herend porcelain set she’d received as a wedding gift. She handed the cup to Noémi before settling into her blush-colored Biedermeier chair. “I am so glad Anna has a friend in the city. It can be lonely, else.” She lifted one eyebrow. “I hear Anna is not the only one with prominent friends. The duke von Rohan has been calling frequently at the Eszterházy Palace.”

  Noémi had said nothing of this to me, which was unlike her. A new distance seemed to yawn between us, but I did not know why, or how to span it. “Who is he?”

  “A friend of my uncle’s.” Noémi shrugged, her eyes downcast behind her spectacles.

  “What of William?” I asked. “I saw him at St. Stephen’s.”

  Noémi caught her breath for the barest moment. I marked it, but I don’t think Catherine did. “William has no time for anything but his causes. You needn’t look so concerned. There is no longer anything between us.” Her face was carefully neutral. Either she truly did not care, or she did not want to, and I would not press her in either case.

  Catherine lifted a saucer and cup from the tray before her, hesitated, then set it down again with a soft clink. “I wish you both could bring yourselves to sever those old ties. It can do you no good to cling to an unpleasant past.” My sister’s eyes flitted from the tea set to Noémi to the window to the crowded mantel. Everywhere in the room but me.

  “Catherine,” I said. Her eyes flew to mine, then dropped. “What ties are you speaking of?”

  “It’s for your own good,” she said.

  The room seemed to pulse around me. “What have you done?”

  “That Kovács boy came to the house. I sent him away, as was my duty as your sister and chaperone.”

  “Have I no right to invite friends here?” It hurt my heart to think of Gábor turned away at our doorstep, his pride snubbed.

  “Proper friends, like Noémi, of course.”

  Proper. Catherine meant that he was Romani. “Gábor—Mr. Kovács—works for Kossuth Lajos as a secretary. He is smart and kind and honorable. Surely there’s nothing objectionable in that?”

  Catherine must have heard some betraying note in my voice, for she paled. “Of course not, in the ordinary way of things. But you must think of your future—when the archduke himself has come calling on you, you simply can’t have feelings for a boy like that. What future could you have? He can never rise to your level: you would have to sink to his.”

  I stood, fury burning through me. “In the qualities that matter, Gábor is more than my equal—he is far kinder and braver than I. And this is not your decision to make—it is mine. You had no right to send him away!”

  “This is my home. I had every right.” Catherine smoothed her skirts. “If you won’t look to your own interests, someone must. And please consider my position—a closer association with the Hapsburgs would benefit Richard’s career enormously, while the merest hint of scandal could crush it.”

  “Of course this is truly about you. When have you ever cared what I wanted?”

  “I might ask you the same,” Catherine said, infuriatingly calm. “But Noémi surely has no wish to hear our quarrels. Pray, don’t be childish.”

  My shadow self stirred, pricked to devilry. So she thought me childish? I plucked up Catherine’s cup, held it over the table, then let it fall. The china rang once before crumbling apart. I felt dangerously close to coming apart myself.

  I braced myself for Catherine’s attack—no, I welcomed it as an excuse to release my own temper. But Catherine merely pressed her lips into a thin line and said, “I’ll send someone to clean this up.” She stood and s
wept to the doorway. There she turned back to me. “We are to attend the Franz Liszt musicale at the Belvedere this evening. It is a very great honor—Liszt has come out of his retirement in Weimar solely to play before the Congress opens. I suggest you adopt better manners before then.”

  “And if I do not?”

  “You will be gracious, Anna, or you will find yourself confined to this flat—if not sent back to England.” She left the room.

  I dropped down into the chair Catherine had vacated and put my burning face in my hands. Blood throbbed at my temple. A moment later, a weight settled across my back: Noémi’s arm around my shoulders.

  “I’m sorry, Anna.” She pulled my hands away from my face. “It’s no easy thing to love where your family disapproves. Or to despise where your family approves.” She sighed. “I suppose one must be practical.”

  I sat upright, but Noémi continued to kneel beside me. I edged cautiously across the bridge she offered me. “The duke von Rohan?”

  She nodded.

  Frustration boiled hot inside me. “I thought when we broke the Binding that everything would change. But it’s all still the same—anyone, anything the least bit different is suspect and outcast. You and I are still trapped by social expectations. This isn’t what we fought for.” This isn’t what Mátyás died for.

  Noémi smiled a little. “One thing has changed. You are braver now than you used to be.”

  Was I? “I hope you are right. In any case, I must see Gábor.”

  “I will help you,” Noémi said, rising to her feet. “Will you walk me home?”

  *

  Halfway between Catherine and Richard’s flat and the Eszterházy Palace, Noémi said, “I had another dream last night.”

  A chill spring wind whirled around us, snatching at my hair. Since the Binding, Noémi had been plagued by dreams. Nightmares, really: blood and bodies and falling stars whose light winked out before they hit the earth. But Noémi believed they were something more. Visions, maybe—some latent, newly emerging Luminate gift.

  I waited.